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Saturday, 12 April 2014

Using Stuff Up

My partner hates wasting food. He will scan the fridge, collect everything near expiration and basically put it on a sandwich. Needless to say, we don't ask him to prepare much in the kitchen!
I don't go that far, but it feels terrible to throw food away and I do get a lot of satisfaction from using up stuff before it spoils. Lately I'm trying to cook more with what I have available at home, as opposed to getting a crazy idea to make some obscure dish (which I've usually seen online along with a drool-worthy photo) for dinner/dessert that requires another trip to the shops and two hours/days preparation!
Here are a few of my recent efforts:

We always have opened jars of tomato sauce and paste in the fridge needing to be used up. This simple pasta and beans concoction turned out beautifully. I fried some garlic and onion in olive oil, added rosemary, tomato paste and pasta sauce and stock, and added the cooked beans and pasta.

We often have leftover tofu stored in water in the fridge. Sometimes I just fry the tofu with some tamari and the kids really like it. This pad thai style dish and popcorn tofu are also good ways to use it up.

I used up some fresh basil and parsley in this sauce and poured it over baked sweet potatoes. It was so good! The sauce was based on the Green Goddess dressing from Appetite for Reduction.

Apple sauce and coconut yoghurt - this was a pretty desperate attempt to save an open jar of apple sauce. It was quite nice though, and Lexie liked it. I've made this apple brown rice breakfast a few times which is a very simple and yummy way to use up apple sauce. Kari's carrot cake pikelets also put apple sauce to great use - a lovely, warming and wholesome breakfast or snack!

9 comments:

I hate throwing out food but I get a mental block on ingredients - we sometimes have potato scones and I put in leftover quinoa - I think soups are one of my favourite easy ways to use up lots of veg and other savoury stuff. Love the pad thai and that vibrant green sauce - glad you enjoy the quinoa muffins - I should make them again

I get a mental block with some ingredients too and am too late to save them! Soups are a great way to use up foods, as is your vegie stock you blogged about recently. Yes, I really love those muffins- even more so because Sylvia will eat them!

It seems that cooking for our partners can be a bit like cooking for fussy kids ;) my partner is too scared to criticise any of my cooking now, so he may well not like some of my experimentation in using up food, haha!

We try not to throw food away ever, but tomato paste and pasta sauce jars catch us out sometimes when they go mouldy! We often have brown rice leftovers, which we turn into brown rice balls with miso, tahini, sunflower seeds and peas and baked in the oven. But now that I've discovered brown rice pudding for breakfast, we've got some competition.

Those balls sound delicious! I find brown rice pretty easy to use up, but yes our tomato paste and sauce jars often go mouldy. I have been known to just empty them into whatever I'm cooking just to use them up :)

Ha ha Jeff has been known to make some pretty crazy sandwiches too! We always have half-finished tins of tomato paste in the fridge as well. I like to make some toast, spread the tomato paste on, Italian herbs, and any other toppings I can find. Pop it back under the grill for a couple of minutes and there you have it, pizza on toast!